Here we have our real gaming tests. Each of the games we chose use multiple cores and GPUs. They are able to stress the system through use of good AI. Both have decent positional audio that adds impact to the sound subsystem of the board. We ran each game through the level or parts listed and recorded frames per second using FRAPS. This brings the whole game into play.

*** A word on gaming as a motherboard test ***

Despite the fact that most games are very GPU limited, we are still noticing HDD and even audio creating issues in gaming performance. Because of this you may see differences in the number of frames rendered per second between different boards. Usually the difference is very small, but occasionally because of bad tracing, poor memory or HDD performance, this difference is significant. The issues are often more prevalent in older versions of DirectX, but can still pop up in DX10 and 11.

Most of you know about the game Modern Warfare 2; it caused quite a bit of controversy in the latter half of 2009. The game is a first person shooter with a heavy combat emphasis. It follows the events in the first Modern Warfare very closely and brings back several characters from the original.

As with most games in the Call of Duty franchise, it features a heavy AI load. This is not because of a complex AI routine, but more due to the sheer number of enemies in any given combat situation. It is also our single DX9 based game in our testing suite. Settings are shown below.

The ASUS RIIIE had odd performance here. It is sitting in the number 2 slot for the stock performance, but comes in last for overclocked. It is even behind the stock GIGABYTE X58 UD7.

Far Cry 2 is a large sandbox style game. There are no levels here so as you move about the island you are on you do not have to wait for the "loading" sign to go away. It is mission driven so each mission is what you would normally think of as the next "level".

In the game you take the role of a mercenary who has been sent to kill the Jackal. Unfortunately your malaria kicks in and you end up being found by him. Long story short, you become the errand boy for a local militia leader and run all over the island doing his bidding. Settings we used for testing are shown below.

The performance tips the other way with Far Cry 2. The RIIIE is at the top of the list. Of course, the difference is so slight I doubt that anyone would notice if they were actually playing the game.

Battlefield Bad Company is another sequel and also another game "franchise". Bad Company 2 is also our DX11 Shooter game. The game follows a fictitious B company team on a mission to recover a Japanese defector. This puts you back in World War II (at least for the beginning of the game) while the multi-player game is centered on much more modern combat. For our testing we used the single player mode. Settings are shown below.

Ouch, for minimum FPS performance the RIIIE is at the bottom of the pile. When we take average FPS into account, then we see that the RIIE is right in with the rest of the gang.

Gaming Conclusion

Our gaming experience with the Rampage III Extreme was as good as any other X58 board we have tested. This is even including using CPUs with less than six cores. The board was responsive and quick, audio was decent while the input devices (mouse and keyboard) gave us no trouble at all.

As we saw from the raw numbers, the RIIIE actually falls somewhere in the middle to lower end for FPS. But of course when you are looking at frame rates ranging from the 70s to 130s, depending on the game, it is hard to call a loser.